1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information processing, and more specifically to a system and method for calculating compensation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Systems have been developed to address compensation calculations. For example, FIG. 1 depicts one example of a commission calculation system 100. In one embodiment, commission calculation system 100 provides a method and apparatus for determining the commission to be paid to a sales representative or sales team. Whenever a sale occurs, a transaction describing the sale is created. When commission calculation system 100 is tasked with determining compensation for one or more sales representatives, all transactions 102 are inputted into the commission engine 104. Based on a set of allocation rules 106 stored in the commission model 108 that specify the credit an individual is to receive from transactions 102, the allocate module 110 converts the transactions 102 into allocations 112 for individual Sales Representatives or Sales Teams. The quota rules 114 specify a target or goal that must be reached for a sales representative or sales team to earn a commission. The commission engine 104 generates quota details 118 from the allocations 112. Quota details 118 are generated by loading customer and product hierarchies into memory and importing transactions in batches. The quota details 118 contain the change in the current status of the sales representative's progress towards a promotion. Each transaction has an associated accumulation of, for example, product sales volume, that is divided into sub-accumulations for each sales representative who will receive credit for the transaction. The aggregate module processes the quota details 118 to determine a quota state 122 for each sales representative. Each sales representative's quota state 122 indicates the current performance of a Sales Representative with respect to a particular quota within a particular time frame. The payout a sales representative is to receive as a result of the aggregated sales transactions is determined by the compensate module 124 using the promotion model 126. The promotion specifies the reward or commission that is received upon attaining a desired level of performance. Once a sales representative's quota state reaches a level necessary to receive a payout, such as a commission or reward, payouts 128 for each sales representative are generated. In this manner, a business may set up incentive plans and determine commissions.
The commission calculation system 100 represents a transaction-based system in that compensation is determined from a set of quota details 118 that indicate the contribution of each transaction to a sales representative's quota. The quota details represent one of the intermediate results generated by commission calculation system 100, which are used to ultimately determine the payout to a sales representative. When hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions are processed on a daily basis, these intermediate results can require a significant amount of physical memory and cause significant increases in payout processing time.